MANILA: Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo on Saturday urged the people to stand for their rights amid persistent threats against freedom of speech and the right to life mainly due to unabated human rights violations including extra judicial killings in the bloody war on drugs.

“The times are challenging as to strengthen our stand to uphold human rights despite what the Filipino has gone through in the past year,” Robredo said in Filipino in her message on the eve of the global observance of International Human Rights Day on Sunday.

“These include,” Robredo said, “extra judicial killings, the suppression of freedom of speech, even in social media, and poverty that continues to cripple millions of our fellow Filipinos.” Church groups and other human rights advocates also warned of more human rights violations with the re-entry of the Philippine National Police (PNP) into the drug war.

Such abuses, they warned, were also imminent with the declaration by President Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing the New People’s Army (NPA) as “terrorist organisations.” However, Robredo supported Duterte’s declaration of the CPP-NPA as terrorist organisations “for sowing fear without any reason.” “Terrorists are those who kill civilians,” Robredo earlier pointed out in a media interview while on a recent visit to Isabela province in the Northern Luzon highlands.

The Duterte declaration came more than a week after he signed a proclamation formally cancelling the peace talks with the communists in Oslo, Norway as the third party facilitator.

Robredo has been outspoken in denouncing particularly the extra-judicial killings and other alleged rampant human rights violations due to the war on drugs.

The PNP insisted that close to 3,000 were killed in “legitimate encounters” but human rights advocates including the Human Rights Watch based in New York claimed that at least 13,000 were slain since Duterte launched the war on drugs when he became president in June 2016.

But on Thursday, Duterte said the campaign would be extended until his six-year term is to end in 2022 in a speech in Pampanga province in Central Luzon.